279/365 - Pot Still

I've been hanging around with the same group of guys for decades now, having met in and around Boy Scouts in our youth, either in the same troops or working together on summer camp staff. Back then, we had taken quite a few extended trips together to various places, but as we've all got married, got jobs, and had kids, those trips were superseded by other things, until about six years ago. We revived the tradition, usually spending Columbus Day weekend away doing a little camping, a bit of tourism, and just getting together to have fun. We've done Acadia National Park (the location of one of our first big trips away in our youth), Quechee Gorge in Vermont twice, and Gettysburg, Pennsylvania over the last few years.

This year's trip was dubbed "Beercation" - we headed up to Portland, Maine for the weekend, a mini-mecca of breweries, excellent pubs, and good food, conveniently only a few hours travel away. On Friday, we stopped by Maine Beer and New England Distilling to sample the wares before heading to our camp site. This is the copper pot still at New England Distillery, a relatively new producer of Genever-style gin, rum, and in the not-too-distant future a "Maryland-inspired" rye whisky. Both the gin and the rum were excellent (we took home a mixed case), as was the experimental double IPA we sampled at Maine Beer.

I didn't break out the DSLR for these stops, so this is a shot taken with my iPhone, processed in Aperture and tonemapped in Photomatix Pro. According to the EXIF data, this was 4.3mm, 1/20s @ ƒ/2.4, ISO50. I'm quite happy with how this turned out, particularly for something shot on the phone.